On 17 September 2010 09:03, Conscious User
wrote:
To be more clear, I think this goal is *already* being achieved quite
nicely by NotifyOSD *when mouse interaction is involved*. The problem
is when one of the two following cases happen:
a) The user is typing something in a text field right behind the
bubble. Your heuristic works in this case, but it's a little bit of
an overkill. I certainly don't mind receiving notifications
when I'm writing something completely far away from the bubble area.
Maybe the heuristic can be refined to not block notifications while typing unless in that case. But then you get the second problem also while writing...
b) The user wants to just read something covered by the bubble. This
is more difficult for your heuristic to cover because he might not be
actually interacting at that moment. In fact, in the case of long
texts he might not be interacting for several seconds.
I actually support having a quick way to close a notification. I don't think it's the traditional 'X' icon, though, but something more radical: hide the notification if the mouse hovers it, and *don't show it again even if the mouse moves away*. The notification should act as a real bubble, disappearing on touch.
As I said, the user moving the mouse over the notifiacion region means that the content was more important at that moment than the notice, so there's no problem in closing it. The information in it should be already in the panels anyway; the user has already taken notice that there existed a bubble, and can go to the appropriate menu to read it.
Combined with my heuristic, there's no problem that an involuntary mouse movement would close the bubble before the user notices it.